Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Today's photo is of a church somewhere in England. Which? I dunno! It's true that all the cathedrals become a blur after a while. I should have keep better track of what pictures were of what. :) I'm confident that one day I'll be able to sort all of these places out. It could only be in Bath, Canterbury, or London -- I didn't hit any other British places. Click to enlarge.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Years ago, when Kloefkorn came to one of my poetry classes, he mentioned something about the fact that children, properly motivated, can sometimes write more profound, more honest poetry than adults. I came across a poem by a 5 or a 6 year old girl at work today, and was reminded of what he'd said. Below is the girl's poem, in full:

Saturday, May 27, 2006

(Note: All photos get super-biggified (850 pixels wide) in a new window when you click them.)

Well, yesterday caught me by surprise! I was back in Kearney, visiting the fam, when Darren Addy called me at around 4PM and asked me if I'd been watching the weather. I hadn't. :) But a quick check of the surface obs and the RUC hinted that if I was willing to drop just a bit south into northwestern Kansas, it might be a fun day. So, I quickly got the car ready (you've never seen me Rain-X so fast!), swung by to pick up Darren, and off we went. We dropped south from Holdrege, and as we did, we could see that the cap had definately broken to our southwest. As we approached the storm that was east of Hill City (at around 6PM, IIRC, though my timeline is fuzzy), the sky was putting on one heck of a mammatus display:

We sat in Norton for a little while watching the storm split. The left split was more or less just sitting there spinning like a top, while the right split, which was quite questionable at first in terms of prospects, soon took off to the east like a jackrabbit and exploded. We took the right split. Now, of course, we were behind and just north of the storm by this point, so we ended up having to punch it. But by that point it seemed very clearly outflow dominant and was transitioning to a something more linear. Darren managed to nagivate the pea hail and crazy winds that were lofting enormous amounts of dust to our north. Eventually, we punched through and got east of it, and holy cow, was that an incredible sight. The storm had developed a HUGE roiling shelf cloud followed by a boiling mass of really dark clouds caused by the outflow. All the pictures below are from after we got east of it. We also ran into a bunch of people on the road who were from Canada and Michigan -- we didn't have much time to talk as the storm was closing in at a rapid clip. If you look close enough, you can actually see one of the Canuakistanians standing stage left in one of the pictures below. :) I never got a chance to give them my name and number like they wanted -- if any of you are reading this and need to get in touch with me, my email is ryan at digicana dot com.

No tornadoes, but WOW what an incredible looking storm! Seriously, it looked like something out of Independence Day! Most of these shots are taken as we race east past Phillipsburg and Kensington.

(a note on this last picture: in order to get the shot with the cemetery sign readable, I had to horizontally flip this photograph in photoshop. Props to Darren for seein' this photo!)

Friday, May 26, 2006

Today's photo of the day is of me. I don't do a lot of self portraits, mainly because they're pretentious by nature ("What, you couldn't think of anything better to take a picture of than you?") -- but I didn't have a model or a buddy around when I saw this door in a back alley in Kearney five or so years ago. So I became my own model. :) Click to enlarge.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Today's photo is of the Roman bath in Bath, U.K. It's green enough where I don't think you'd actually want to take a dip in it anymore but, alas, it was still cool. My favorite part were the pipes -- I didn't realize it, but the Romans actually fabricated lead pipes to carry the water. Wow.

I also liked how they had a nice scheme going -- "drink 10,000 year old spring water for only a pound!" -- the idea being that the water you were drinking had spent the last 10,000 years bubbling it's way up through the rocks. That may have been true, but pretty much all water that we drink is millions of years old, and most of it has been doing much more interesting things than bubbling up from underground. :)

Today's photo of the day is from my recent scans of the Europe trip from ages ago. This is the interior of a cathedral in England -- I'm a bit embarrased to say that I don't remember which freakin' one it was. :) I think after I go through the negs a bit more it'll come back. This photo has a few problems in my opinion, but I was still pretty new to photography when I took it, and I was using an old Canon P&S film camera with no manual exposure settings. Click to enlarge.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Today's photo of the day is from when I jusssst first bought my EOS-3 from Josh and was running a few rolls of B&W through it to see what it could do. This was taken from probably around 100 yards away at UNK -- the family is walking near the waterfall, if you know where that is.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Here are a whole slew of photos from Ye Olde Nerdfest -- also known as the "James Arthur Annual Renaissance Festival". Yes, nothing like sampling crappy wine (with maybe the exception of Nebraska White), knawing on a giant turkey leg, then trying your greasy hand at archery. (Who's the genius who put drinking and archery together, anyway?!) Click to enlarge.

A quick negative abstract of barbed wire that surrounded some of the vines.

Haha! I jump into Lanette's shot!

I believe that this was the "Wench Walk", though I'm not sure. Basically it was a giant belly dance by women of all shapes, ages, and sizes. This lady seemed to be an old pro.

Of course, there was falconry, too. This bird (a red-tailed hawk) was huge! Apparently it likes to eat rabbits.

Now for like the past two months, Josh has nothin' but whine about my sweet sweet 10-22 superwide lense. He says it distorts people way too much -- anything at the edge of the frame gets strectched horizontally, sometimes with comical results. The only response to such criticism is to make sure that I take lots of photos of him with this distorting lens. ;)

These two guys were jugglin' fools. One of them would dance in the background and play a violin; the other would juggle dangerous things and tell corny stories. Their act was a little rusty, but they were pretty darn talented.

Near the end of the act, one of the jugglers picked Rob (Lanette's husband) out of the crowd to help out with the burning torches. Rob's a chef; as the italians would say, he's a' no' a'scared of the flambé.

Me n' Josh pause to chow on the better half of what appeared to be a former-kickboxer turkey while Lanette shows off her handiwork to Rob.

Josh tries his hand at archery -- he stuck the troll in the throat. :)

Lanette took a couple shots, too. I won't tell you where on the troll her arrows landed; it's too painful to put into words!

A couple parting shots of the red-tailed falcon. We had a pretty awesome time; I'll probably do it again next year, if I'm still in Lincoln. I'll post Lanette's shots and a link to Josh's shots once I get 'em.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Today's photo of the day comes from Union Station in Kansas City, the second largest train station in America (next to Grand Central in New York.) Unlike Grand Central, it's a fairly quiet place. But it has great interior architecture. And mad props to the guy you waxes the floor -- there's someone who takes pride in his work!

Still getting through the negs. Today's photo of the day comes from a bridge in London just as a rainshower is finishing up. Typical London, everyone (except me, the Nebraskan) had a brolly. Click to enlarge.

Today's photo of the day comes from my continuing effort to plow through my Europe trip negs. This shot is at Trafalgar Square, back in the day when the authorities still allowed the feeding of pigeons. It was quite a spectacle, though probably not the healthiest thing ever. At any rate, this girl caught my eye, and I took her picture just as she looked up and noticed me. Click to enlarge.

Friday, May 19, 2006

I've been plowing through my old Europe negs (the second trip), and I noticed that, even way back then, I was trying to do "photostitching". Now this was shot on film for photos, not digital, and so my idea of "stitiching" at the time was taping the photos together. ;) Little did I know that I'd one day scan then and make a better go at it:

Still not the best shots in the world (and you can kinda see the stitch), but it's surprising what can be done with film and Photoshop, especially considering this was shot with a P&S Canon that didn't give me any manual exposure control. Clickin' makes 'em bigger.

Today's photo of the day comes from Westminster Abbey many years ago. This is another one of those photos I wish I could go back and take now with my broader knowledge of photography. :) Click to enlarge.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Today's photo of the day is of the kooky lady who lives in a tent in front of the White House telling passers-by to beware the dangers of depleted uranium. Her name is Concepcion Picciotto, and she's been camped here since 1981. You can read more about her at her website, here.